Suicide bombings kill more than one hundred in Yemen

Niles Williamson

Yemen’s civil war continued its spiral downward on Friday as a branch of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) claimed responsibility for suicide bombings at two Houthi mosques in the capital city of Sanaa during the peak of weekly prayers.

ISIS claims that four of its fighters blew themselves up at the Badr and Hashush mosques in Sanaa. A third attack on a mosque in the northern Houthi-controlled province Saada was thwarted by security forces.

The attack was one of the deadliest assaults on civilians in Yemen in recent years, killing at least 142 people and injuring hundreds more. The Houthis, who belong to the Zaydi Shia sect, are considered heretics amongst the Sunni Salafi fundamentalists that comprise ISIS.

An audio recording published online, reportedly from the ISIS affiliate, cautioned that Friday’s attack was “the tip of the iceberg” in attacks on Houthis. “Let the polytheist Houthis know that the soldiers of the Islamic State will not rest and will not stay still until they extirpate them,” the statement warned.

Friday marks the first known foray by forces associated with ISIS into the multifaceted sectarian conflict which threatens the breakup of the Yemeni state. The existence of the branch in Yemen was first announced by ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in November of last year.

The Houthi militias have been consolidating control over the capital after the forced resignation of President Abdu Rabbuh Mansour Hadi in January. The Houthis have been occupying the capital since September and took control of the presidential palace at beginning of the year. Last month, Hadi escaped house arrest in Sanaa and fled to his hometown of Aden in southern Yemen. He subsequently declared that he was still the President of Yemen and that the Houthi regime was unconstitutional.

The assault by ISIS comes amidst escalating factional fighting for control over the country between the Houthis, Hadi, and forces loyal to former longtime dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was forced to cede power in 2012 in the face of mass protests. Saleh, currently in exile in Ethiopia, has been backing the Houthis and asserting influence in the country through members of the Special Security Forces (SSF) which remain loyal to him.

Forces loyal to Saleh launched an assault on the international airport in Aden Thursday, days after Hadi attempted to dismiss the commander of the SSF. Hadi’s forces were able to repel the attack and overran the SSF base. Jets under the control of Saleh loyalists responded to Thursday’s setback by bombarding Hadi’s Aden compound for a second day on Friday.

Yemen is rapidly descending into chaotic conflict between multiple sectarian factions stoked by American imperialism and the regional powers of Saudi Arabia and Iran. The United States supported the transition from Saleh to Hadi in 2012 and has since worked with the Houthis to maintain its drone operation and the presence of CIA and other special operatives in the country. Saudi Arabia has given support to the Sunni tribes and Al Qaeda forces in their fight to overthrow the Houthis. Iran, meanwhile, has backed both the Houthis as well as Saleh in his effort to unseat Hadi.

Further escalating the situation, it was reported that forces associated with the Al-Qaeda affiliated Ansar Al Sharia seized control of the southern city of Al Houta on Friday. Fighting between Yemeni security forces, Al Qaeda militants, and other separatist fighters resulted in the deaths of at least 27 Yemeni soldiers.

Since 2002 the United States government has been launching drone strikes and cruise missiles against members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). According to Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates, as many as 639 people have been killed in confirmed US drone strikes between 2002 and 2015, with 96 of the total being civilians.

The last reported drone strike, carried out on March 1 in Shabwa province, killed as many as three people. The strike came as AQAP militants were engaged in combat with Houthi militias in Bayda province.

Yemen occupies a geo-strategically vital position along the Mandeb strait, a strategic waterway through which ocean-faring transport ships gain access to the Suez Canal in Egypt. A significant portion of the world’s oil and other commodities therefore passes by Yemen.

Years of fighting amongst the various parties has resulted in a serious humanitarian crisis throughout the country which is amongst the poorest in the Arab world. Constant attacks on oil, gas, electric and communications infrastructure have seriously affected economic development. The poverty rate in Yemen rose from 42 percent in 2009 to more than 54 percent in 2012. The country’s economy has seen negligible growth since it contracted by nearly 13 percent in 2011.

Detroit to resume mass water shutoffs

Andre Damon

Detroit, the poorest large city in America, is set to resume water shutoffs for tens of thousands of residents. Next month, the city will begin posting 800 shutoff tags a day on the doors of residents who have fallen behind on their water bills, giving them ten days to pay up or lose access to water in their homes.

As many as 28,000 households could have their water cut off beginning in mid- to late April. The city has already begun disconnecting water service for hundreds of people who were “illegally” receiving water. The policy could potentially affect close to 100,000 people, or 14 percent of the city’s residents.

The denial of a basic necessity of life to tens of thousands of people in one of America’s largest cities reveals the real state of social relations in America. The American financial oligarchy and its political puppets in both parties are waging class war against working people in every part of the country. There are no limits to their ruthlessness, brutality or barbarism.

Last year, the city shut off water to more than 30,000 households, but temporarily halted additional shutoffs once winter temperatures made the process more difficult. The shutoff program is intimately connected with the city’s bankruptcy, which concluded late last year with the approval of a plan to slash city retirees’ pensions and health benefits and privatize city services.

The resumption of water shutoffs follows the announcement of water rate increases of 3.4 percent in Detroit. The sewerage portion of residents’ bills will go up by 16.7 percent. The broader metro Detroit area, including Wayne County, which has a poverty rate twice the national average, will see water rate increases of up to 12 percent.

In October of last year, US bankruptcy Judge Steven Rhodes ruled against a challenge to the city’s water shutoff policy, declaring that there is no “fundamental enforceable right to free or affordable water… Just as there is no such affordable right to other necessities of life such as shelter, food and medical care.”

This is the unvarnished voice of the American ruling class, spoken by its black-robed enforcer. These words—reactionary as they are heartless—were spoken by the same man who presided over an illegal bankruptcy process, which, in violation of the explicit language of the state constitution, imposed sweeping cuts on the pensions of thousands of retired city workers.

Judge Rhodes was far more generous to the lawyers and consultants who made a fortune from the bankruptcy operation. He approved $178 million in legal and consulting fees, including $58 million for the well-connected law firm Jones Day, where Kevyn Orr was a partner until he was appointed by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to run the city. Orr took Detroit into bankruptcy in July of 2013.

This brazenly undemocratic operation was carried out under the de facto dictatorship of Orr, who superseded all elected officials during his year-and-a-half year stint as emergency manager. He had the bipartisan backing of both big business parties—a Republican governor and state legislature, a Democratic mayor and City Council, and the Obama White House.

Detroit’s water shutoff plan has drawn widespread international condemnation, including from the United Nations. In June, three representatives of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights signed a statement declaring that “Disconnection of water services because of failure to pay due to lack of means constitutes a violation of the human right to water and other international human rights.”

Even before the water shutoffs went into effect last year, Detroit already had an extremely high incidence of electricity and gas utility shutoffs, which have led to scores of fires throughout the city and dozens of deaths in recent years.

City authorities have claimed that charity water payment assistance is broadly available, but less than one thirtieth of those facing water shutoffs have received assistance so far.

Detroit’s plans to raise rates and cut off service to residents are driven by the demands of the banks and big investors, who are seeking to squeeze as much money out of the city’s impoverished population as possible.

The resumption of water shutoffs is bound up with plans to privatize the Detroit’s water department stemming from the city’s bankruptcy. In September, the city’s water department was spun off to a regional authority, with members appointed from the city, the surrounding counties, and one member appointed by the governor. The spin-off is widely seen within official circles as a prelude to the sale of the system to private investors.

This week, Bill Nowling, a spokesman for the new regional water authority, spelled out in an interview with the Detroit News the financial interests driving the campaign of shutoffs. “Making sure that DWSD [Detroit Water and Sewerage Department] itself in its current state is as sound fiscally as it can be is very important in the minds of creditors, which are ultimately going to approve a regional deal…

“People have become conditioned to say ‘well, I’m short tonight. I’m going to pay my water bill next month.’”

The shutoffs are also part of an attempt to drive sections of poor and working class people out of the city and transform select parts of the downtown and midtown areas into playgrounds for the affluent, while enriching speculators such as Little Caesar’s Pizza billionaire Mike Ilitch, who owns the city’s professional baseball and hockey teams, and Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert.

Ilitch is receiving $286 million in public subsidies to pay for the construction of a new hockey stadium. Gilbert, who has bought up prime downtown real estate at bargain basement prices, has been put in charge in demolishing abandoned homes, the better to cash in on his investments.

Detroit’s water shutoff policy is in line with the general aim of the bankruptcy procedure—to use the bankruptcy court to provide a legal cover for the theft of billions of dollars in city workers’ pension and health benefits, as well as the sell-off of public assets to private investors.

The Detroit City Council, which fully supported the bankruptcy proceeding, is now clamoring for a ten percent pay raise for its members, even as the poor and elderly have their water shut off and retired city workers see their pensions slashed and their health benefits gutted.

These attacks have been made possible by the complicity of the trade unions, including the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the United Auto Workers union (UAW), which backed the bankruptcy in exchange for a share in the financial spoils, including control over two Voluntary Employee Beneficiary Association (VEBA) funds worth $524 million.

The cutoff of water to tens of thousands of Detroit residents is an indictment of the capitalist system. The very fact that water is a commodity—rather than a necessity guaranteed to every man, woman and child—testifies to the irrationality and bankruptcy of the profit system. Access to clean water, like a decent-paying job, food, shelter and education, must be seen as a social right that cannot be denied to any person.

The only way to secure these rights is to nationalize the utilities—such as water, electricity and gas—under the democratic control of the working class, as part of a socialist program to transform the major corporations into public entities and reorganize society on the basis of social need, not private profit.

Bellum Americanum: US imperialism’s delusions of world conquest

Joseph Kishore

The US Congress and White House are currently in discussions over the federal budget for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins in October. Amidst the various tactical disputes over ruling class policy, on one issue there is near-universal agreement in Washington: there must be a significant and immediate increase in funding for the already gargantuan Pentagon war machine.

The lead in this campaign has been taken by the White House, with Obama’s new defense secretary, Ashton Carter, declaring Wednesday that the president would veto any budget that did not remove the so-called “sequester” caps on military spending introduced in 2011. While Congress has found various ways to get around these caps over the past several years, the Pentagon is insisting that they be formally eliminated.

In his testimony, Carter outlined the basic considerations motivating this demand. “In order to ensure our military remains the world’s finest fighting force, we need to banish the clouds of fiscal uncertainty that have obscured our plans and forced inefficient choices. We need a long-term restoration of normal budgeting and a deal… that lives up to our responsibility of defending this country and the global order.”

Here, the pretense that the US is engaged in a campaign to defend human rights or ensure democracy is all but dispensed with. The United States “must protect the homeland, build security globally, and project power and win decisively,” the defense secretary declared. In other words, the US military must be in a position to conquer the world, and it must have unlimited funds at its disposal in order to do so.

The United States more and more resembles a garrison state, in which enormous funds are diverted to finance instruments of repression and war. The scale of the US military today dwarfs anything that could have been imagined by President Dwight Eisenhower when he warned more than a half century ago of the power of the “military-industrial complex.”

Obama’s budget calls for $561 billion in “base” military spending. This figure, which is $38 billion above the sequester cap, does not include $51 billion in supplementary war funds included in the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) budget. In their own budget proposal, House Republicans have formally adhered to the spending caps, while funneling tens of billions of additional funds into the OCO in order to make up the difference.

By way of comparison, Obama’s budget calls for only $70 billion in discretionary spending for the entire Department of Education and $84 billion for Food Stamps, to service a caseload of about 46 million people requiring nutrition assistance. The budget allocates about $7 billion for emergency disaster relief.

Even as they pump billions more into the US war machine, Democrats and Republicans alike insist that funding for core social programs such as Medicare and Social Security must be cut.

The Pentagon budget, according to Carter, is needed to finance a force of nearly two million troops—Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force—or close to one out of every 150 American citizens. The military is also planning to purchase an array of new equipment to expand its already enormous war machine.

The Navy wants two new missile destroyers, at a cost of between $1.5 billion to $2 billion apiece, to deploy in Europe or Asia. The Air Force is angling for hundreds of new F-35A fighter planes, at more than $100 million each. Billions are to be allocated to purchase drones used to rain down bombs on the Middle East and Africa, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars each.

The discussion over the funding of the military underscores the basic fact that war has become the centerpiece of ruling class policy in the United States. On the eve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, President George H.W. Bush declared a “new world order”—a permanent Pax Americana.

However, the fall of the USSR did not signal the final triumph of American capitalism. Rather, it marked a new stage in the global crisis of the nation-state system and breakup of the post-World War II international equilibrium, which had been anchored by the economic and industrial dominance of American capitalism. At the heart of this crisis was the protracted decline in the world economic position of the United States—a process that accelerated after the demise of the Soviet Union.

No longer feeling constrained by the presence of the Soviet Union, the US corporate and financial aristocracy sought to offset America’ economic decay by relying on its still-dominant military power to threaten, bully, attack and, where necessary, destroy would-be challengers to US world supremacy.

Nearly a quarter century later, the United States is engaged in an unending series of invasions, occupations, counter-insurgency wars and covert operations in nearly every corner of the globe. It is also seeking to conquer outer space and is waging war in cyberspace.

According to one count, US military or Special Operations Forces were deployed in 133 countries last year—that is, 70 percent of the planet’s nation states. This includes open wars as in Iraq and Afghanistan; the expanded “war on terror” throughout the Middle East and North Africa; the massive military buildup against Russia in Eastern Europe; and the “pivot to Asia,” which involves a network of military bases and alliances directed against China.

American imperialism’s futile and mad attempt to counter its long-term economic decline by military means has produced one disaster after another. Every country that has had the misfortune of entering the crosshairs of US imperialism had been plunged into chaos. But none of these bloody operations have halted the decline of American capitalism or the rise of competitors such as China.

The debacles produced by Washington’s reckless resort to military violence have only propelled the ruling class to broaden the scope of its military operations, expand the list of potential enemies, and prepare quite consciously and deliberately for world war.

The contradictions confronting American imperialism were revealed this month when Germany, France, Britain and Italy delivered a humiliating blow to the United States by joining the China-sponsored Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, despite direct appeals from the Obama administration. The major imperialist powers, compelled to advance their interests within the framework of the US-dominated post-World War II order, are remilitarizing and beginning to chart a course that will inevitably lead some of them—Germany? Japan?—into direct conflict with the United States itself.

In the transformation of Pax Americana into Bellum Americanum, there is another factor that is of immense significance: the enormous social contradictions within the United States itself. The combination of rapacious plundering by the financial aristocracy and ever-increasing demands by the military-intelligence apparatus has bankrupted American society. Social tensions are at a breaking point.

Hence the ruling class’ deployment of its military power ever more directly against social opposition at home, through the integration of the police with the military and intelligence agencies to form a “total army.”

The crisis of American capitalism—both external and internal—also points to the means through which the looming threats of nuclear war and dictatorship can be opposed: the class struggle and social revolution.

Israel Votes Apartheid

Neve Gordon

Benjamin Netanyahu is truly a magician. Just this past Friday, most polls indicated that his Likud party would likely receive around 21 seats in the Israeli Knesset, four seats less than Yitzhak (Bougie) Herzog’s Zionist Camp (Labor Party’s new name). Revelations of corruption at the Prime Minister’s residence followed by a damning comptroller report about the real estate crisis, alongside industrial downsizing, union strikes, predictions of a weakening economy, a diplomatic stalemate, and increasing international isolation all seemed to indicate that Netanyahu was on his way out. But just when it seemed that the Zionist camp would replace the nationalist camp, the crafty campaigner began pulling rabbits out of his hat.

As if his decision to alienate the Obama Administration over the Iran negotiations was not enough, Netanyahu began pandering to the right by notifying the world that Palestinians were destined to remain stateless since he no longer believed in the creation of another Arab state alongside Israel. He presented the Likud party as the victims of a leftist media conspiracy aimed at ousting the right-wing government, while conveniently ignoring that his ally Sheldon Adelson owned Yisrael Hayom, Israel’s most widely circulated paper. He entreated his voters to return “home” promising to address their economic needs. And on Election Day itself, he frightened the Jews by declaring that Israel’s Palestinian citizens were rushing to the polls in droves, thus presenting Palestinians who cast votes for their own representatives as an existential threat.

Pandering and fear mongering together with hatred for Arabs and the left are the ingredients of Netanyahu's secret potion, and it now appears that many voters were indeed seduced. Within a matter of a few days Netanyahu garnered almost ten additional seats for his party, cannibalizing two of his extreme right allies: Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinuand Naftali Bennett's Habayit Hayehudi. Owing to his magic, the Likud did much better than expected, and together with the ultra-Orthodox parties and a new party recently formed by a former Likud minister, Kulanu (All of US), an extreme right wing bloc with 67 out of 120 seats will almost certainly be created (and this even before the soldier's votes have been calculated, which are usually right of center).

The outcome is clear: the people of Israel have voted for Apartheid.

It is now extremely likely that a spate of anti-democratic laws that had been shelved will soon resurface. These include laws that monitor and limit the financing of human rights NGOs, restrict freedom of the expression, reduce the authority of the Supreme Court, cancel the official status of Arabic, and, of course, bring to a vote the nation-state law. This bill, which was originally drafted by a Likud member, defines Jewishness as the state’s default in any instance, legal or legislative, in which the state's Jewishness and its democratic aspirations clash. This means that Laws that provide equal rights to all citizens can be struck down on the pretense that they violate the state's Jewish character. Moreover, this law reserves communal rights for Jews alone, thus denying Palestinian citizens any kind of national identity.

Alongside anti-democratic legislation, we can also expect an array of discriminatory policies to be enacted. The new government will likely implement some variation of the Prawer plan, which intends to forcefully relocate thousands of Palestinian Bedouins and take over their land. It will continue pouring billions of dollars on Israel's settlement in the West Bank and Golan Heights and expropriate more houses and land in East Jerusalem. And it will probably imprison thousands of refugees and “illegal” migrant laborers from Africa currently workers in Israeli cities.

There is, however, one clear advantage to the election results: clarity. At least now there will be no liberal Zionist façade, camouflaging Israel’s unwillingness to dismantle its colonial project. The Israeli refrain that a diplomatic solution with the Palestinians cannot be achieved because the Palestinians lack leadership will ring even more hollow. Finally, the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East will exposed for what it is: a half truth. While Israel is a democracy for Jews it is a repressive regime for Palestinians.

We can also expect little resistance to the right-wing government, since Herzog's Zionist Camp and Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid are also Arabphobes and therefore less against the substance of such a government and more against Netanyahu's blatant right wing style. After all it was a political pac associated with Herzog's party that in the days leading to the elections paid for large billboards with a picture of (Bibi) Netanyahu and his extreme right contender Naftali Bennett warning the viewers that "With Bibibennet we will remain stuck with the Palestinians for eternity." The pac must have overlooked the fact that 20 percent of Israeli citizens are Palestinians.

And yet, during these elections there was one ray of light that shimmered through the darkness. The attempt by most of the Jewish parties to sideline the Palestinian citizens produced an unintended result. Creating a united front, the Palestinians garnered 14 seats, almost 25 percent more than they received in the previous elections, and they are now the third biggest faction in the Knesset. Unlike many of his counterparts, Ayman Odeh, the head of the new Joint Arab List, is a true leader. Extremely incisive, he often uses irony and wit to undermine his detractors while advancing an egalitarian vision for the future. In a moment of candor, a well-known Israeli commentator characterized his demeanor as a serious threat: "He’s really dangerous," she said, "he projects something every Israeli can relate to.”

Will this threat be able to stop the imminent entrenchment of a tide of new Apartheid laws? I sincerely doubt it.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Europe

Danish Pugwash Group

Abstract

The danger of nuclear war is very great today, especially because of the Ukraine crisis and the danger of accidents. We would like to suggest that, in exchange for withdrawal of U.S. Nuclear weapons from Europe, the Russian government might be persuaded to eliminate its tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe.

The dangers are very great today

Let us first consider the urgent reasons why all nuclear weapons must be eliminated. Although the Cold War has ended, the danger of a nuclear catastrophe is greater today than ever before. There are 16,300 nuclear weapons in the world today, of which 15,300 are in the hands of Russia and the United States. Several thousand of these weapons are on hair-trigger alert, meaning that whoever is in charge of them has only a few minutes to decide whether the signal indicating an attack is real, or an error. The most important single step in reducing the danger of a disaster would be to take all weapons off hair-trigger alert.

Bruce G. Blair, Brookings Institute, has remarked that “It is obvious that the rushed nature of the process, from warning to decision to action, risks causing a catastrophic mistake... This system is an accident waiting to happen.” Fred Ikle of the Rand Corporation has written,“But nobody can predict that the fatal accident or unauthorized act will never happen. Given the huge and far-flung missile forces, ready to be launched from land and sea on on both sides, the scope for disaster by accident is immense... In a matter of seconds, through technical accident or human failure, mutual deterrence might thus collapse.”

Although their number has been cut in half from its Cold War maximum, the total explosive power of today’s weapons is equivalent to roughly half a million Hiroshima bombs. To multiply the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by a factor of half a million changes the danger qualitatively. What is threatened today is the complete breakdown of human society.

Nuclear terrorism

There is no defense against nuclear terrorism. We must remember the remark of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan after the 9/11/2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. He said, “This time it was not a nuclear explosion”. The meaning of his remark is clear: If the world does not take strong steps to eliminate fissionable materials and nuclear weapons, it will only be a matter of time before they will be used in terrorist attacks on major cities. Neither terrorists nor organized criminals can be deterred by the threat of nuclear retaliation, since they have no territory against which such retaliation could be directed. They blend invisibly into the general population. Nor can a “missile defense system” prevent terrorists from using nuclear weapons, since the weapons can be brought into a port in any one of the hundreds of thousands of containers that enter on ships each year, a number far too large to be checked exhaustively.

As the number of nuclear weapon states grows larger, there is an increasing chance that a revolution will occur in one of them, putting nuclear weapons into the hands of terrorist groups or organized criminals. Today, for example, Pakistan’s less-than-stable government might be overthrown, and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might end in the hands of terrorists. The weapons might then be used to destroy one of the world’s large coastal cities, having been brought into the port by one of numerous container ships that dock every day. Such an event might trigger a large-scale nuclear conflagration.

The Ukraine crisis

Today, the world is facing a grave danger from the reckless behavior of the government of the United States, which recently arranged a coup that overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. Although Victoria Nuland's December 13 2013 speech talks much about democracy, the people who carried out the coup in Kiev can hardly be said to be democracy's best representatives. Many belong to the Svoboda Party, which had its roots in the Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU). The name was an intentional reference to the Nazi Party in Germany.

It seems to be the intention of the US to establish NATO bases in Ukraine, no doubt armed with nuclear weapons. In trying to imagine how the Russians feel about this, we might think of the US reaction when a fleet of ships sailed to Cuba in 1962, bringing Soviet nuclear weapons. In the confrontation that followed, the world was bought very close indeed to an all-destroying nuclear war. Does not Russia feel similarly threatened by the thought of hostile nuclear weapons on its very doorstep? Can we not learn from the past, and avoid the extremely high risks associated with the similar confrontation in Ukraine today?

Lessons from World War I: The danger of escalation

Since we have recently marked the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, it is appropriate to view the crisis in Ukraine against the background of that catastrophic event, which still casts a dark shadow over the future of human civilization. We must learn the bitter lessons which World War I has to teach us, in order to avoid a repetition of the disaster.

We can remember that the First World War started as a small operation by the Austrian government to punish the Serbian nationalists; but it escalated uncontrollably into a global disaster. Today, there are many parallel situations, where uncontrollable escalation might produce a world-destroying conflagration.

In general, aggressive interventions, in Iran, Syria, Ukraine, the Korean Peninsula and elsewhere, all present dangers for uncontrollable escalation into large and disastrous conflicts, which might potentially threaten the survival of human civilization.

Another lesson from the history of World War I comes from the fact that none of the people who started it had the slightest idea of what it would be like. Science and technology had changed the character of war. The politicians and military figures of the time ought to have known this, but they didn't. They ought to have known it from the million casualties produced by the use of the breach-loading rifle in the American Civil War. They ought to have known it from the deadly effectiveness of the Maxim machine gun against the native populations of Africa, but the effects of the machine gun in a European war caught them by surprise.

Nuclear war: an ecological catastrophe

Few politicians or military figures today have any imaginative understanding of what a war with thermonuclear weapons would be like. Recent studies have shown that in a nuclear war, the smoke from firestorms in burning cities would rise to the stratosphere where it would remain for a decade, spreading throughout the world, blocking sunlight, blocking the hydrological cycle and destroying the ozone layer. The effect on global agriculture would be devastating, and the billion people who are chronically undernourished today would be at risk. Furthermore, the tragedies of Chernobyl and Fukushima remind us that a nuclear war would make large areas of the world permanently uninhabitable because of radioactive contamination. A full-scale thermonuclear war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe. It would destroy human civilization and much of the biosphere.

One can gain a small idea of the terrible ecological consequences of a nuclear war by thinking of the radioactive contamination that has made large areas near to Chernobyl and Fukushima uninhabitable, or the testing of hydrogen bombs in the Pacific, which continues to cause leukemia and birth defects in the Marshall Islands more than half a century later.

The illegality of NATO

In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.

Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO's legally binding framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO's territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include the whole world”

Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This requirement is somewhat qualified by Article 51, which says that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Thus, in general, war is illegal under the UN Charter. Self-defense against an armed attack is permitted, but only for a limited time, until the Security Council has had time to act. The United Nations Charter does not permit the threat or use of force in preemptive wars, or to produce regime changes, or for so-called “democratization”, or for the domination of regions that are rich in oil. NATO must not be a party to the threat or use of force for such illegal purposes.

In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously affirmed “the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal”. The General Assembly also established an International Law Commission to formalize the Nuremberg Principles. The result was a list that included Principles VI, which is particularly important in the context of the illegality of NATO:

Principle VI: The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:

a Crimes against peace: (I) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (I).

Robert H. Jackson, who was the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, said that “To initiate a war of aggression is therefore not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty

At present, NATO's nuclear weapons policies violate both the spirit and the text of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in several respects: Today there are an estimated 200 US nuclear weapons still in Europe The air forces of the nations in which they are based are regularly trained to deliver the US weapons. This “nuclear sharing”, as it is called, violates Articles I and II of the NPT, which forbid the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear-weapon states. It has been argued that the NPT would no longer be in force if a crisis arose, but there is nothing in the NPT saying that the treaty would not hold under all circumstances.

Article VI of the NPT requires states possessing nuclear weapon to get rid of them within a reasonable period of time. This article is violated by fact that NATO policy is guided by a Strategic Concept, which visualizes the continued use of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future.'

The principle of no-first-use of nuclear weapons has been an extremely important safeguard over the years, but it is violated by present NATO policy, which permits the first-use of nuclear weapons in a wide variety of circumstances.

Russian tactical nuclear weapons

Russian nuclear weapons, both tactical and strategic, also represent a grave danger to human civilization and to the biosphere. We would like to suggest that a bargain might be reached. In exchange for the withdrawal of US tactical nuclear weapons in Europe, as well as the lifting of the present European sanctions directed against the Russian economy, it might be possible to persuade the Russian government to eliminate all of their tactical nuclear weapons directed against Europe.

Establishment opinion shifts towards nuclear abolition

The complete elimination of nuclear weapons is by no means a hopeless cause. While the Ukraine crisis is a great step backwards, there are indications that the establishment is moving towards the point of view that the peace movement has always held: - that nuclear weapons are essentially genocidal, illegal and unworthy of civilization; and that they must be completely abolished as quickly as possible. There is a rapidly-growing global consensus that a nuclear-weapon-free world can and must be achieved in the very near future.

One of the first indications of the change was the famous Wall Street Journal article by Schultz, Perry, Kissinger and Nunn advocating complete abolition of nuclear arms. This was followed quickly by Mikhail Gorbachev’s supporting article, published in the same journal, and a statement by distinguished Italian statesmen. Meanwhile, in October 2007, the Hoover Institution had arranged a symposium entitled “Reykjavik Revisited; Steps Towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons”.

In Britain, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Lord Hurd and Lord Owen (all former Foreign Secretaries) joined the former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson as authors of an article in The Times advocating complete abolition of nuclear weapons . The UK’s Secretary of State for Defense, Des Brown, speaking at a disarmament conference in Geneva, proposed that the UK “host a technical conference of P5 nuclear laboratories on the verification of nuclear disarmament before the next NPT Review Conference in 2010” to enable the nuclear weapon states to work together on technical issues.

In February, 2008, the Government of Norway hosted an international conference on “Achieving the Vision of a World Free of Nuclear Weapons”. A week later, Norway’s Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, reported the results of the conference to a disarmament meeting in Geneva. On

July 11, 2008 , speaking at a Pugwash Conference in Canada, Norway’s Defense Minister, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, reiterated her country’s strong support for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons .

In July 2008, Barack Obama said in his Berlin speech, “It is time to secure all loose nuclear materials; to stop the spread of nuclear weapons; and to reduce the arsenals from another era. This is the moment to begin the work of seeking the peace of a world without nuclear weapons.” Later that year, in September, Vladimir Putin said, “Had I been told just two or three years ago I wouldn’t believe that it would be possible, but I believe that it is now quite possible to liberate humanity from nuclear weapons...”

Other highly-placed statesmen added their voices to the growing consensus: Australia’s Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, visited the Peace Museum at Hiroshima, where he made a strong speech advocating nuclear abolition. He later set up an International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament co-chaired by Australia and Japan. On January 9, 2009, four distinguished German statesmen (Richard von Weizäcker, Helmut Schmidt, Egon Bahr and Hans-Dietrich Genscher) published an article entitled “Towards a Nuclear-Free World: a German View” in the International Herald Tribune.

Going to zero

On December 8-9, 2008, approximately 100 international leaders met in Paris to launch the Global Zero Campaign . They included Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan, Norway’s former Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, former UK Foreign Secretaries Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Margaret Beckett and David Owen, Ireland’s former Prime Minister Mary Robinson, UK philanthropist Sir Richard Branson, former UN Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala, and Nobel Peace Prize winners President Jimmy Carter, President Mikhail Gorbachev, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prof. Muhammad Yunus. The concrete steps advocated by Global Zero include:

• Deep reductions to Russian-US arsenals, which comprise 96% of the world’s nuclear weapons.

• Russia and the United States, joined by other nuclear weapons states, cutting arsenals to zero in phased and verified reductions.

• Establishing verification systems and international management of the fuel cycle to prevent future development of nuclear weapons.

The Global Zero website contains a report on a new public opinion poll covering 21 nations, including all of the nuclear weapons states.The poll showed that public opinion overwhelmingly favors an international agreement for eliminating all nuclear weapons according to a timetable. It was specified that the agreement would include monitoring. The average in all countries of the percent favoring such an agreement was 76%. A few results of special interest mentioned in the report are Russia 69%; the United States, 77%; China, 83%; France, 86%, and Great Britain, 81%.

On April 24, 2009, the European Parliament recommended complete nuclear disarmament by 2020. An amendment introducing the “Model Nuclear Weapons Convention” and the “Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol” as concrete tools to achieve a nuclear weapons free world by 2020 was approved with a majority of 177 votes against 130. The Nuclear Weapons Convention is analogous to the conventions that have successfully banned chemical and biological weapons.

More recently, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon initiated a comprehensive 5-point program for complete nuclear disarmament, and in December, 2014, Austria hosted the Third International Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons. At the conference, the Austrian government issued an extremely strong statement in which they pledged to work for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. More than 50 governments have already signed statements endorsing the Austrian pledge.

Long-term goals

Both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1996 decision of the International Court of Justice require all nuclear weapons states to rid themselves completely of their nuclear weapons. In response to questions put to it by WHO and the UN General Assembly, the IJC ruled that “the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and particularly the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” In addition, the Court added unanimously that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict international control.” Article VI of the NPT also requires signatories of the treaty to completely eliminate their nuclear weapons.

It is a life-or-death question. We can see this most clearly when we look far ahead. Suppose that each year there is a certain finite chance of a nuclear catastrophe, let us say 2 percent. Then in a century the chance of survival will be 13.5 percent, and in two centuries, 1.8 percent, in three centuries, 0.25 percent, in 4 centuries, there would only be a 0.034 percent chance of survival and so on. Over many centuries, the chance of survival would shrink almost to zero. Thus by looking at the long-term future, we can clearly see that if nuclear weapons are not entirely eliminated, civilization will not survive.

Civil society must make its will felt. A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with dedication to prevent it. 

To Survive, We Must Act Now On Global Warming

Lionel Anet

To ensure that our offspring can live through this and next century, we must do what seems impossible. And that’s to have a worldwide united action to stop that dangerous warming. The wealthy 1% is now focused on maximising their wealth;we must showthe unavoidable disaster they will face in pursuing this ridicules goal. They must see their wealth will be useless in the future onour lifeless planet. That ignorance of those educated 1% is not due to stupidity, they’re acting according to the system. They’ve had a highly focus education and interest on their all-important finance, the one that validates greed, its arrogant self-importance, and with its fictional value for the world economy.

Nevertheless, we must,somehow change their attitude. We can already see that it’simpossible to deal with our warming planet by using the present financial system. If it would be possible we would have already acted on it, at least a decade ago.That pursuit of wealth can only lead to human extinction and maybe even the end of life on earth.

The competitive pursuit of wealth determines nearly all information we get, starting from our education,which is geared to grow the economy, it also guides our thinking. Therefore, we must convince as many of those individuals who have captured the financial market and their supporters that it will be fatal for them to maintain that state. However, we mustn’t see them as enemies; on the contrary we must save them from committing unintentional suicide, as it would also include everyone. To save ourselves we mustn’t have enemies, or else we can’t have the necessary unite action to put us on a survival course and deal with global warming as the number one priority.

According to current Atmospheric studies we will need to drastically reduce our carbon emissions very soon and work on reforestation as a life or deaf issue to avoid a runaway warming that would last, maybe for ever. Just think of a 3metre sea level rise within 85 years, and still going up. It’s a high possibility, and with the wildest weather ever and an over two degrees higher temperature.

This isn’t a fight against anyone; it’s a struggle for everyone’s life. To survive we will need a vast cooperative effort, this in turn can only work in a fair and honest world of very social societies. By pursuing that struggle for survival, the benefits to everyone will out do any loss encountered even by the 1%, and that’s besides just surviving.

The ticklish aspects of that propose tactics isthat we must change smoothly with no real or perceived sacrifice on anyone. The first change we must make is withthe financial sector, which feeds on and produces the wastages in the capitalist system. That system must have increasingthroughput to function to its standard. This can no longer be so. Therefore, whichever waywe decide, changes will happen, so let’s do it the way that will improve our lives instead of letting the system run over us. Just a few changes would go a long way to reduce some of the unfairness and place the economy in a better state to deal with global warming. But we must convince those few who control societies through its public relation companies- the media, that their existence is at stake to have any worthwhile change.

As they are the vital influence on public opinion, they have their salvation and ours in their hands. We may only convince a few at first, but survival is contagious. That proposal for our survival may seem farfetched according to most concerned people and therefore they may notconsider it.Yet I haven’t seen any solutionthat would ensure our children’s survival. That’s because the problem is less than fifty years old, it’s completely new and therefore needs a new approach.

Crosscurrents

Kathy Kelly

By the time I leave Kentucky's federal prison center, where I'm an inmate with a 3 month sentence, the world's 12th-largest city may be without water. Estimates put the water reserve of Sao Paulo, a city of 20 million people, at sixty days. Sporadic outages have already begun, the wealthy are pooling money to receive water in tankers, and government officials are heard discussing weekly five-day shutoffs of the water supply, and the possibility of warning residents to flee.

This past year United States people watched stunned as water was cut off, household by household, to struggling people in Detroit, less due to any total water shortage than to a drying up of any political power accessible to the poor in an increasingly undemocratic nation. A local privatization scheme left the city water department underfunded, while dictatorial "emergency management" imposed by the state chose to place the burden of repaying a corrupt government's bad debt on Detroit's most impoverished people. U.S. people were forced to remember the guarantee offered by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, entered into as a treaty obligation by world nations after WWII, that access to water is an inalienable human right. All over the world, water scarcity is becoming a dire threat to the possibility of, as Prof. Noam Chomsky phrases it, decent human survival.

Professor Yang Yoon Mo

Faced with such news, it is perhaps odd that I think of Professor Yang Yoon Mo, a South Korean activist I have met who, far from any area of drought, has fought instead, and with beautiful and irrepressible courage, to save a small lush rocky outcropping ringed by ocean, and with it both the shoreline, and the hopes for a peaceful future, of his home village.

In 2008, Prof. Yang returned to Jeju island, having left a rewarding life as a famed artist and film critic in the capital, Seoul, to join protests against construction of a planned naval base on the shores of Gangjeong, a village in Jeju Island. Though described as part of South Korea's national defense, the base's dimensions are fitted to the massive size of United States nuclear submarines and Aegis destroyers, part, as Larry Kerschner notes, of a military buildup forming "a semi-circle of naval and other bases surrounding China," the United States' "Asia Pivot" away from focus on the Middle East and toward its traditional superpower rivals. Nobody in Jeju is to be made safer by the base.

Professor Yang Yoon Mo was born on Jeju in 1956, when it was already illegal for traumatized survivors there to mention the recent massacres. Under U.S. occupation between 1948 and 1952, the military government had killed tens of thousands of independence protesters and militants. After a half century of official silence, the South Korean government has apologized and erected a memorial on Jeju memorializing perhaps 14,000-30,000 people killed on Jeju Island alone, many in their prison cells, during a tragic time referred to locally as the April 3rd massacre. Many residents are understandably less than eager to welcome a U.S. military presence back to the island.

When he was born, Professor Yang's mother resolved to protect her son from the tragedy that had befallen her father and uncle, both killed in the massacres. She wanted to steer her son into a safe position in life, even if it meant becoming part of the government establishment.

But, at an early age, Professor Yang showed talent as an artist and he simply didn't "fit in" to the narrow, safe routes his mother's great fear for him dictated. As a teenager, he became fascinated by cartoons, including, to his mother's alarm, political cartoons, and he tried to correspond with mainland South Korean cartoonists. His mother interfered with his correspondence and took to destroying his art. He began to mistrust her and even hate her. Understanding has come to him, since. It was through extensive research and time for reflection, during a recent imprisonment, that he finally began to understand why his mother had wanted so badly to protect him. Among some families on Jeju Island, discussions of the past are still considered off-limits. But professor Yang steadily developed his artistic instincts and his readiness to step beyond borders of acceptable communication. As an artist, he found that his mission was to discover beauty, to protect it, and make it known to the world.

When I met him, he told me, "I have become someone who was willing to die for a rock."

In 2008, the Gureombi Rock was a kilometer-long volcanic outcropping rising stubbornly above the waves somewhat in the manner of a never-suppressed memory of injustice and lying squarely in the way of base construction. In 2008, after participating for 7 nights and 8 days in a pilgrimage to resist the construction, Prof. Yang decided to move to Gangjeong, and in 2009, he pitched a tent on the Gureombi Rock, an exquisitely beautiful, tiny island off the shore of Gangjeong, where he stayed until he was forcibly removed in 2011.

"I focused on Gureombi and not anything else," he told me. "I felt full devotion, full immersion, full absorption."

Over the coming years he would be imprisoned four times, for a total of 555 days. He almost has died. Along with his imprisonments Professor Yang, who is nearly sixty, has endured three prison fasts ranging in length from fifty to seventy-two days, refusing solid foods as a sign of his longing, his hunger, to protect the environment near his home. His most recent prison fast only ended when environmental and peace movement activists came to the prison to persuade him to continue working alongside them.

I visited Gangjeong, and met Professor Yang, in the spring of 2014. Taking a cue from organizers who have spent years protesting U.S. military bases elsewhere in the Pacific Basin, the activists in Gangjeong hold daily protests. Each morning, we would all assemble at the construction site gates, from which South Korean police would carry many of us away in our chairs to allow the passage of construction vehicles and crews to and from the site. Assemblies included Buddhist prayer chants, celebration of the Catholic daily mass and rosary recitation, dances of universal peace, songs and chants.

After several hours of spirited witness and protest, villagers and guests would go to the Gangjeong community kitchen, open seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and enjoy delicious meals together, accepting a free will offering. One afternoon, at the community kitchen, most of the activists had finished their lunch and left when I noticed a slight, unassuming man slipping into the dining hall, fixing himself a tray, and sitting down to eat, alone. I recognized Prof. Yang from the banners and posters that lined roadways up to the construction site and adorned the village community center, the library and the coffee house. His most recent imprisonment had lasted 435 days.

Along with Professor Yang, I met his friend and mentor, Brother Song, a Mennonite minister who, while the Gureombi Rock still stood, nonviolently resisted its destruction by attempting to swim to it, every day. Security posted at the site would roughly throw him back into the water every day, but Brother Song was undeterred.

The protests continue, the kitchen is still open, while inside the construction site, crews assault Gangjeong's beautiful shoreline. Day and night, the South Korean government, in collusion with major companies like Samsung and Hyundai, deploys "construction" crews to rip up plant life, destroy coral reefs, bulldoze and explode entire small islands, threatening the way of life that villagers have long preserved, and arming the United States for cold war competition with China. Sasha David, at the start of his book The Empire's Edge (p.7) writes that the U.S. military buildup in the region "is less about being able to defeat China militarily (that is already possible) and more about leverage in being able to dictate terms of trade in the region."

Gureombi rock is gone from its place on the Jeju coastline. The base plans required its complete demolition: It can no longer be seen.

"Gureombi is inside of me," says Prof. Yang.

Professor Yang Yoon Mo said that earlier in his life, he would have felt defeated after destruction of the Gureombi Rock and the continued construction of the naval site. Now, he says, he realizes that the purpose for peace and environmental action continues, and he is excited to continue envisioning demilitarized islands working together for peace and environmental protection. When I last met him, along with Brother Song, it was in Seoul, South Korea, upon Professor Yang's return from a conference, held in Okinawa, Japan, uniting island activists throughout the region. They were coordinating future plans, and Professor Yang Yoon Mo said that he could even contemplate a fifth imprisonment if it would help broaden and diversify the movement.

I don't think Gureombi is gone, with the way it has changed Prof. Yang, and his community, and incidentally me. We're not permitted to ignore the beauty and hope of the present. If we close our eyes we can put ourselves in an all-too-plausible future where our resources are gone, and the human community, and the world is already barren, and by implication not worth working to save. That's when we need to become someone willing to live and work for a rock.

Back at home, and growing in part out of Occupy Sandy's grassroots humanitarian response to the recent climate-driven disaster in New York, the Detroit Water Brigade has responded to its own city's horror both with political agitation and water distribution programs. They're posting on their sites about Sao Paulo. Prof. Yang's sometime mentor, the activist Bruce Gagnon writes: "From the point of view of corporate capital we are all expendable. We are not going to defeat these corporate forces by remaining isolated inside our single-issue silos ... There is a direct connection between the massive $1 trillion a year Pentagon budget [ ] and the destruction of social progress. There is a direct connection between the military's huge carbon bootprint and climate change." The swim to our neighbor islands will tend to be part of saving our own.

Living, as I briefly do, in a world of imprisoned beauty, on an island inside that archipelago of U.S. prisons so unacceptably similar to that of our old superpower rival, it's no wonder I'm thinking of Prof. Yang Yoon Mo. What we do to the environment, we're doing to each other. What we let our state impose on those walled beyond our borders we will tend to inflict on more and more people walled up within them, until there is no world of beauty left to keep safe for our own use, and no trust left on which any safety can be built. Until it all dries up. Whereas if we recommit to risk and beauty, refusing paths of alleged safety which only avoid temporary danger by leading us toward certain doom, if we seek our security in treating other people fairly, we may find our way to decent lives, along the way toward "decent human survival."

IMF rejects Sri Lankan request for loan bailout

Saman Gunadasa

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has rejected a request by the Sri Lankan government of President Maithripala Sirisena for a $US4 billion loan in order to restructure debt repayments on high-interest Chinese loans negotiated by the government of former president Mahinda Rajapakse.

The decision was announced in Colombo on March 4, after a nine-day review of the Sri Lankan economy by the IMF’s so-called Post-Program Monitoring Mission team headed by Todd Schneider. The IMF insisted that the government had to maintain its target budget deficit of 4.4 percent of GDP this year.

The IMF’s blunt rejection of the loan request, which will mean further austerity measures for Sri Lankan workers and the poor, follows Finance Minister Ravi Karunanayake’s meeting last month in Washington with IMF chief Christine Lagarde. As well as a $4 billion loan, the finance minister requested deferral of IMF loan repayment instalments.

Karunanayake told the media after his Washington meeting that “there is a lot of international goodwill and we can get finance from the IMF and World Bank at 0.5 percent [interest rate].”

The finance minister’s illusions were quickly shattered, however, on March 4, when Schneider, told the media in Colombo that there was no need for a bailout. Sri Lanka’s foreign reserves were “comfortable,” he said, and the current situation was different to 2009 when the previous government obtained a bailout loan of $2.6 billion loan to avert a balance-of-payment crisis. While Schneider said the situation could be reviewed, the IMF warned last year that Sri Lanka was vulnerable to external shocks due to high level of commercial loans.

The real reason for the IMF refusal is not Sri Lanka’s “comfortable” foreign reserves but disagreement with the Sirisena government’s recent budget, which promised salary and pension increases for public sector employees and limited increase of social welfare measures.

Schneider said the Sri Lankan government would have “difficulty in keeping to the budget deficit target of 4.4 percent due to a rise in expenditure caused by salary hikes and poor tax collection”. He insisted on the need for “structural reforms” and enhanced productivity and competitiveness. In other words, more privatisation of state-owned enterprises was required and other measures to intensify the exploitation of Sri Lanka’s cheap labour workforce.

The IMF insisted that the Sirisena government prepare contingency measures to meet any revenue shortfall. It also voiced its displeasure over a partial reduction of import taxes on some food items and the imposition of various one-off taxes on the super profits of the corporate sector, the telecom sector, alcohol manufacturers, and on newly-built large houses. These one-off tax measures, Schneider said, “do not constitute a step towards a more effective tax system.”

Sirisena’s election as president in January followed his defection from Rajapakse’s cabinet and the support of various opposition parties, including the pro-US United National Party (UNP), in his presidential campaign. This regime-change operation, which also involved former president Chandrika Kumaratunga, was sponsored by Washington and was in order to bring Colombo fully into line with the US “pivot” against China.

Sirisena promised voters that if elected he would introduce a “one hundred days” reform program. The new government faces parliamentary elections in June and is attempting to use its recent budget measures to win popular support.

The government has promised a 10,000-rupee salary rise for public sector employees with a 5,000-rupee allowance from February and another 2,000-rupee allowance in June. While taxes of some food items have been reduced, the price of rice, the most essential staple, has increased.

The IMF also noted that Sri Lanka’s debt was currently equivalent to 88.9 percent of the country’s $60 billion economy, a dramatic increase in its debt to GDP ratio, which was at 78.3 percent in 2013.

The IMF also said the Central Bank’s intervention into foreign exchange markets to defend the rupee over the past six months should be toned down. “Intervention should be limited to dealing with excessive short-term volatility,” Schneider said.

The rupee dropped from 129 against the US dollar in August to 135 in January, and is currently about 132, with continuing downward pressure. Central Bank interventions have slashed Sri Lanka’s foreign currency reserves from $9.2 billion in June to $7 billion last month.

The main reason for pressure on the country’s exchange rate is because international speculators, who previously bought Sri Lankan treasury bonds, are now selling them and investing in more profitable markets. US portfolio investors are principal foreign investors in the Sri Lankan bond market.

The former Rajapakse regime and the current Sirisena government have intervened to prop up the Sri Lankan rupee in order to prevent a drastic collapse of the currency and rapid price rises that would have added to anti-government discontent among the working class and rural poor.

The IMF’s refusal to grant Sri Lanka a bailout loan will see further increases in government debt and heightened demands for further social austerity measures.

Leading Sri Lankan economist Indrajith Kumaraswamy recently told a Colombo seminar: “With no access to that concessional [IMF] money, Sri Lanka is now pushed into borrowing from the far more brutal and potentially oppressive scrutiny of international markets at commercial rates which is sending the country into crippling debt rather than towards development.”

Kumaraswamy attacked the government’s public sector wage increases and other minor concessions, declaring that the Sri Lanka’s “welfare state,” was no longer affordable.

The IMF has predicted that Sri Lanka’s economic growth will be 6 to 7 percent this year, claiming that it was “relatively robust.” This growth, however, is mainly dependent on infrastructure projects, tourism and remittances from expatriate Sri Lankans, sectors acutely sensitive to the global economy and international geo-political pressures.

As the Sirisena government shifts its foreign policy orientation and strengthens its ties with India and US, tensions are increasing between Beijing and Colombo and compounding Sri Lanka’s economic crisis. This was highlighted when Colombo suspended the massive $1.4 billion, Chinese-financed, Colombo Port City project. During the past five years China has invested $5 billion in infrastructure and other developments in Sri Lanka. Any suspension of these projects will deepen the Sri Lankan government’s crisis.

The IMF’s demands for increased social austerity measures will be implemented by whichever party alliance forms government following the forthcoming parliamentary elections in June.

South Korea pushes for inclusion in US anti-missile system

Ben McGrath

The recent attack on US ambassador to South Korea Mark Lippert by a solitary assailant has provided the South Korean ruling class with the opportunity to throw its weight behind the US and its “pivot to Asia”.

After the attack, the ruling Saenuri Party, backed by the media, began to whip up an anti-North Korean, pro-US atmosphere, fearing that the assault on Lippert could damage relations with Washington. In particular, the party has called for the US military’s Thermal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile system to be dispatched to South Korea.

Saenuri Party floor leader Yu Seung-min stated on March 9, “The THAAD system is a matter of national survival—an issue about how we can fend off North Korea’s nuclear attacks and which path we should take as we are put between the US and China.”

The US has been pushing South Korea hard to join its regional anti-missile system along with Japan. While Washington and Tokyo have worked closely together, Seoul has been reluctant, not wanting to upset Beijing. The THAAD is a ground-based system working in conjunction with the X-Band radar, two of which have been placed in Japan. However, in December, Seoul signed up to a trilateral intelligence sharing agreement with Washington and Tokyo that would be essential to a joint anti-missile system.

Until now, the government of President Park Geun-hye has relied on a policy of “strategic ambiguity;” not expressing support for the THAAD’s dispatch to South Korea nor flat out rejecting it. As yet Washington has not made a formal request. While Seoul now has close economic ties to China, it has indicated its support for Washington’s “pivot to Asia” which is aimed at undermining China militarily and economically and maintaining US hegemony in the Indo-Pacific region.

The US military, however, has been scouting out suitable locations for a THAAD deployment since last May while exerting constant pressure on South Korea. Pentagon press secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby in February stated that there had been “constant discussions” with South Korea over the anti-missile system.

Regardless of the discussions, Seoul has in essence already agreed to host the THAAD system. Last Sunday, a South Korean military official informed the Yonhap News Agency, “The US plans to deploy the [THAAD] in case of an emergency on the Korean Peninsula. My understanding is that THAAD is easily transportable with a US military aircraft.”

While both Washington and Seoul claim that the THAAD is defensive in nature and aimed at countering a North Korean attack, the main target is China. Should the United States launch a nuclear first strike on China, the THAAD would be employed to knock out whatever counterattack Beijing managed to launch. With 28,500 US troops stationed in South Korea, the US ally would quickly be drawn in to any such conflict.

South Korea’s Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok criticized Beijing on Tuesday saying, “Neighbors can have their own positions on the (possible) deployment of the THAAD system here by the US Forces Korea. But they should not try to influence our security policy.”

Kim’s comments follow several weeks of lobbying by China against the installation of THAAD systems on the Korean Peninsula. China’s Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs Liu Jianchao was in Seoul on Monday for “very candid and free discussions over the THAAD issue” with his counterpart Lee Gyeong-su. Liu called on South Korea to “[take] account of China’s concerns and worries.”

Last month, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei warned that the THAAD’s deployment to South Korea would undermine the growing relationship between Seoul and Beijing. He stressed that sentiment again on Tuesday, calling on Seoul to be “prudent.”

The US and South Korea are also aware of public opposition to military escalation in the region as well as to the continued US military presence on the Korean Peninsula. Neither wants to stoke public resistance. In 2008 and 2011, mass protests took place against the importation of US beef over fears of mad cow disease and the US-South Korean Free Trade Agreement respectively.

The opposition Democrats, currently calling themselves the New Politics Alliance for Democracy (NPAD), have not opposed the THAAD plans in principle but because antagonizing China cuts across the interests of big business that has connections to the NPAD. The party hopes for closer economic ties with Beijing while often utilizing anti-American and anti-Japanese sentiment to win support.

Senior NPAD lawmaker An Gyu-baek said in a recent interview, “The deployment of THAAD would lead to the formation of two trilateral alliances: South Korea, the US, and Japan in the south and North Korea, Russia, and China in the north. The creation of a new Cold War regime would have a negative influence on the South Korean economy.”

NPAD leader and former presidential candidate Moon Jae-in also met with China’s ambassador to Seoul Qiu Guohong last Friday and stated that Beijing must play an important role in inter-Korean relations.

At the same time, Moon backed the US military presence in the region, claiming that it contributes “to maintaining peace between the two Koreas and maintaining a balance and peace in the entire Northeast Asia region.” Moon made the comments in a meeting with Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. “The role of US Forces Korea (USFK) must be maintained even after reunification,” he continued.

The Saenuri Party has also stepped up its campaign against opposition parties accusing them of North Korean sympathies. Saenuri Party spokesman Park Dae-chul last week called the NPAD a former “host of pro-North Korean forces” while calling on the party to “write a letter of repentance.” Last December, the government disbanded the opposition Unified Progressive Party (UPP) using bogus allegations that it had links with North Korea.